Top 180 Nate Silver Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it. The last forty years of human history imply that it can still take a long time to translate information into useful knowledge, and that if we are not careful, we may take a step back in the meantime.”

— Nate Silver

152. “You don’t want to treat any one person as oracular.”

— Nate Silver

153. “If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.”

— Nate Silver

154. “Scientific progress is harder to measure than economic progress.32 But one mark of it is the number of patents produced, especially relative to the investment in research and development. If it has become cheaper to produce a new invention, this suggests that we are using our information wisely and are forging it into knowledge.”

— Nate Silver

155. “An economic model conditioned on the notion that nothing major will change is a useless one.”

— Nate Silver

156. “I don’t think you should limit what you read.”

— Nate Silver

157. “All I know is that I have way more stuff that I want to write about than I possibly have time to.”

— Nate Silver

158. “How can we apply our judgment to the data – without succumbing to our biases?”

— Nate Silver

159. “In 2011, he said that Donald Trump would run for the Republican nomination – and had a “damn good” chance of winning it.19.”

— Nate Silver

160. “We face danger whenever information growth outpaces our understanding of how to process it.”

— Nate Silver

161. “It is the alternative – failing to change our forecast because we risk embarrassment by doing so – that reveals a lack of courage.”

— Nate Silver

162. “Success makes you less intimidated by things.”

— Nate Silver

163. “Ordinary Americans were also concerned. Google searches on the term “housing bubble” increased roughly tenfold from January 2004 through summer 2005.”

— Nate Silver

164. “Who needs theory when you have so much information? But this is categorically the wrong attitude to take toward forecasting, especially in a field like economics where the data is so noisy.”

— Nate Silver

165. “It’s a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.”

— Nate Silver

166. “I think punditry serves no purpose.”

— Nate Silver

167. “The fundamental dilemma faced by climatologists is that global warming is a long-term problem that might require a near-term solution.”

— Nate Silver

168. “The Weather Service was initially organized under the Department of War by President Ulysses S. Grant, who authorized it in 1870. This was partly because President Grant was convinced that only a culture of military discipline could produce the requisite accuracy in forecasting25 and partly because the whole enterprise was so hopeless that it was only worth bothering with during wartime when you would try almost anything to get an edge.”

— Nate Silver

169. “The forecasters later told researchers that they were afraid the public might lose confidence in the forecast if they had conveyed any uncertainty in the outlook.”

— Nate Silver

170. “So we should have some sympathy for economic forecasters.50 It’s hard enough to know where the economy is going. But it’s much, much harder if you don’t know where it is to begin with.”

— Nate Silver

171. “I’m not trying to do anything too tricky.”

— Nate Silver

172. “After adjusting for inflation, a $10,000 investment made in a home in 1896 would be worth just $10,600 in 1996.”

— Nate Silver

173. “Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine – but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.”

— Nate Silver

174. “The blind spots in our thinking are usually of our own making and they can grow worse as we age.”

— Nate Silver

175. “The irony is that by being less focused on your results, you may achieve better ones.”

— Nate Silver

176. “That meant that for every dollar that someone was willing to put in a mortgage, Wall Street was making almost $50 worth of bets on the side.”

— Nate Silver

177. “Even if you fly twenty times per year, you are about twice as likely to be struck by lightning.”

— Nate Silver

178. “Successful gamblers – and successful forecasters of any kind – do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence.”

— Nate Silver

179. “Bayes’s theorem deals with epistemological uncertainty – the limits of our knowledge.”

— Nate Silver

180. “The word objective is sometimes taken to be synonymous with quantitative, but it isn’t. Instead it means seeing beyond our personal biases and prejudices and toward the truth of a problem.”

— Nate Silver

181. “The alchemy that the ratings agencies performed was to spin uncertainty into what looked and felt like risk.”

— Nate Silver

182. “I actually buy the paper version of The New York Times maybe once or twice a week.”

— Nate Silver

183. “I was losing – a lot: about $75,000 during the last few months of 2006, most of it in one horrible evening. I played through the first several months of 2007 and continued to lose – another $60,000 or so. At that point, no longer confident that I could beat the games, I cashed out the rest of my money and quit.”

— Nate Silver

184. “On the other hand there was its culture. New Orleans does many things well, but there are two things that it proudly refuses to do. New Orleans does not move quickly, and New Orleans does not place much faith in authority. If it did those things, New Orleans would not really be New Orleans. It would also have been much better prepared to deal with Katrina, since those are the exact two things you need to do when a hurricane threatens to strike.”

— Nate Silver

185. “We can perhaps never know the truth with 100 percent certainty, but making correct predictions is the way to tell if we’re getting closer.”

— Nate Silver

186. “Alvin Toffler, writing in the book Future Shock in 1970, predicted some of the consequences of what he called “information overload.” He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.42.”

— Nate Silver

187. “What makes them so tragic is the gap between what his characters might like to accomplish and what fate provides to them. The idea of controlling one’s fate seemed to have become part of the human consciousness by Shakespeare’s time – but not yet the competencies to achieve that end.”

— Nate Silver

188. “The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information.”

— Nate Silver

189. “Some of you may be uncomfortable with a premise that I have been hinting at and will now state explicitly: we can never make perfectly objective predictions. They will always be tainted by our subjective point of view.”

— Nate Silver

190. “The Industrial Revolution largely began in Protestant countries and largely in those with a free press, where both religious and scientific ideas could flow without fear of censorship.25.”

— Nate Silver

191. “Never before in human history have so many predictions been made so quickly and for such high stakes.”

— Nate Silver

192. “The panel may as well have been flipping coins. I determined 338 of their predictions to be either mostly or completely false. The exact same number – 338 – were either mostly or completely true.”

— Nate Silver

193. “We are undoubtedly living with many delusions that we do not even realize.”

— Nate Silver

194. “We may, without even realizing it, work backward to generate persuasive-sounding theories that rationalize them, and these will often fool our friends and colleagues as well as ourselves.”

— Nate Silver

195. “In any contentious debate, some people will find it advantageous to align themselves with the crowd, while a smaller number will come to see themselves as persecuted outsiders. This may especially hold in a field like climate science, where the data is noisy and the predictions are hard to experience in a visceral way. And it may be especially common in the United States, which is admirably independent-minded.”

— Nate Silver